Comic Book Ruminations of the Nerdy Kind (as if there's any other type)

So Krypton orbited a red sun and had a gravitational pull many times stronger than that of Earth, right? Now, my science may be off here, so please feel free to correct me, but that leads me to believe that this here star (Rao?) was a Red Giant on the way to supernova (a trip that can take billions of years, but still). So, whether or not Krypton blew up on its own, weren’t the Kryptonians eventually and thoroughly screwed either way?

Yes, this is precisely the sort of thing I think about during 3 a.m. feedings. Why do you ask?

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I decided to read The Dark Knight Strikes Again over the weekend. I picked up the first two issues and liked them well enough, but for whatever reason I never got around to picking up the third until last summer, when I found it in somebody’s dollar box at Wizard World Philly. I figured with all the hoo-hah surrounding Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s All-Star Batman this week (which I won’t be able to read for myself until my DCBS shipment comes at the end of the month), now might be a good time to go back and give DK2 a whirl. I figured that since I did seem to like it at the time, it’d be fun to go back and finally finish off the story, and maybe become one of those rare few that actually defend it as a decent work.

That all fell apart about halfway through that long-ignored third issue. My bad. I apologize for trying. You’re right, Internet, and I’m sorry.

I do believe I understand Miller’s intent here, though. I’m definitely from the school of thought that believes this his karmic bitchslap to all those people who took The Dark Knight Returns entirely too seriously, and that he intentionally made DK2 as bright and over-the-top as DKR was grim & gritty. And I think this story was a prescient in its own way as the original was. DKR said (in my opinion) that that the old heroes (and, by extension, everything they stand for) just don’t fulfill the needs of the American society of the 80s and 90s anymore and will be replaced by something much darker (I didn’t agree with that, but that’s what I got out of it). DK2 said that American society is hungry for a return to the days of yore, and that okay, fine, we can have our old heroes back. But if you think they aren’t going to have been seriously warped by the events of the last two decades, you’ve got another thing coming there, Sonny Jim, because even the silliest Silver Age story can now have a creepy and sinister undercurrent that can be mined for future stories. The world’ll be brighter, sure, but don’t expect to get your fun back.

So in the end, I don’t believe DK2 ultimately worked as a story, but as a message, hey, mission accomplished.